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December 7, 2003
Review: All things weird and horrific
FASCINATION with the supernatural is as old as storytelling. In the 19th century, writers like Mary Shelley and R. L. Stevenson used the horror story to look seriously at the limits of human creative capacity and understanding. Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are part of this genre’s great achievements.
Today’s master of horror is Stephen King. Blending an immense gift for storytelling with acute psychological insight, From a Buick 8 unfolds a tale of extraordinary events in the light of the proviso that for sanity’s sake the human mind needs to accept the limitations on its ability to explain everything. The weird things that go on outside and inside people’s heads are part of the way we experience the world. They test our character as well as our understanding, challenging us to concede our limits - we simply cannot know all.
“If I’m doing my job, then all the time that you’re reading the books, you should want to know what happens next.” In a recent interview, King disarmingly sums up what his writing seeks to do. As a compulsive reader of the books under review, I thoroughly endorse his achievement. I should add that my fascinated reading of From a Buick 8 was inspired less by expectation of the next supernatural twist — the light quakes and strange birthings of the mysterious Buick in the title — than by endless insight into the cops’ experience and humanity. This is irresistibly detailed as the troopers of Troop D describe their participation in the twenty-year-old vigil over their strangest charge. Curtis Wilcox’s friends and colleagues take turns relating to his son Ned how a car abandoned at a nearby gas station has tested their credulity and reinforced their comradeship over two decades. As each team member brings his/her own personality and experience to bear on the story, fantastic events mingle with gripping accounts of emergencies in the action-packed lives of the cops on duty.
In the process, the reader accesses two realities. One is the grotesque world of the Buick, which swallows up humans who come too close and spews out deformed creatures to be battled against its dramatic powers. The other world are the everyday experiences and emotions of the narrators. Sergeant Sandy Dearborn recalls with respect and affection the obsessive mindset with which Curt set about his scientific investigation of the bat-like creature disgorged in one major Buick episode. And he reflects with true compassion on Ned’s obsessive search for links between the Buick story and his loss of a beloved parent. Ned is persuaded to let go only after a personal encounter with the Buick in the horrific culmination of the story, his questions unresolved.
Other questions surrounding the Buick remain unanswered. One is Shirley Pasternak’s sense that at least one of the species unleashed was capable of thinking. Another unsolved puzzle is whether Brian Lippy, a real prisoner brought back to the station the night of Ned’s encounter, was the Buick’s last victim or did he simply disappear.
If the bulk of Buick is daunting , the fourteen stories collected in Everything’s Eventual deal out the exciting ambiguity of King’s preoccupation with the supernatural in measured doses. One of King’s favourite devices, the first person narrator, is used a good deal in these stories to project horrific events through the vivid responses of ordinary small town America narrators.
The narrator of the title story, “Everything’s Eventual”, is a high school dropout who gets the chance to make a fancy living out of his talent for murderous mind games. His weird ability is the conduit to a speculative reality in which the human mind combines with technology to achieve feats of destruction we can as yet only dream of. You finish the story asking the uneasy question: how far might bloodless electronically-induced violence be the ghastly way we’re heading.
The dream is another device King uses in several stories to examine the human capacity for self-torment . In “That Feeling You Can Only Say in French”, Carol Shelton’s sense of dij‘ vu on a nostalgic journey in Florida uses the repetitive dream to project what King, in his comment on the story, calls his idea of hell. “My idea is that it might be repetition.”
It was stimulating to read so much of King in one go. For those who need no introduction to his novels, the stories too are highly recommended. Besides being compulsive reading, they alert the reader to just how far King’s treatment of the supernatural goes beyond his much attested ability to tell a chilling story.
From a Buick 8
ISBN 0 340 77070 8
462pp. Rs375
Everything’s Eventual
ISBN 0 340 77074 0
538pp. Rs275
By Stephen King
Hodder & Stoughton
Available with Paramount Books, 152/O, Block 2, PECH Society, Karachi-75400.
Tel: 021-4310030
Email: paramount@cyber.net.pk
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